Mechanized TMS Data Migration

71.4%

...automated Non-SAP to SAP TMS migration.

Background

As the world’s largest mining company, BHP Billiton’s Treasury Operations are among the most advanced in the corporate environment. As a very early adopter of the Treasury Management System (TMS) in the 1990’s, BHP Billiton Treasury have been at the forefront of the development and advancement of the TMS.

Challenge

In 2012, BHP Billiton, having identified an extremely strong business case, decided to migrate their operations from Quantum to SAP Treasury (TRM) to bring the Treasury operations onto the common group wide 1SAP unified process platform.

Having operated SunGard Quantum at such an advanced level, with customised developments and imbedded processes, for such a prolonged period, a great deal of complexity was embedded into BHP Billiton’s legacy TMS implementation. With a global spread of cash and deals across at least 700 bank accounts and over 1000 company codes, the migration from Quantum to SAP TRM, was no trivial task.

Challenges were faced around the
methodology of the data load into SAP TRM and what approaches to take. Given
that SAP data migration for the SAP TRM implementation at BHP Billiton necessitated
use of two technical data migration techniques, namely LSMW and BAPI, Covarius
were tasked with building extraction mechanisms for both.

Creating an efficient and effective
approach for extracting data was not the only issue faced by Covarius. Very low
levels of design and mapping of data fields between SAP TRM data migration
techniques and SunGard Quantum database tables were needed, along with a
performance efficient mechanism of cleansing, extracting and staging data prior
to loading data to SAP.

Approach

Managing the liquidity, financial reporting and risks of such a large corporate treasury, implied a large and diverse portfolio of complex loans, bond-swap hedges, options and vanilla FX and money market deals. Covarius was mandated by BHP Billiton Treasury to identify, design and deliver the most automated solution possible to help migrate this extensive trade portfolio from SunGard Quantum to SAP TRM.

The initial complexities that this process encountered were centred around the vast differences between the design and architecture of both systems.

The term 'round peg in a square hole' was certainly appropriate. Compounding this problem where SAP specific vagrancies and differing Treasury terminology, which made data mapping a challenging task.

Covarius seconded a lead Quantum Architect, a lead SAP Data Migration expert and SAP Data Migration consultant for the 1SAP Treasury project, in order to solidify the 1SAP Treasury data migration and reconciliation.

The approach recommended to the client by Covarius included:

Initiating a series of data migration and data conversion workshops at key points during the project. These workshops served to inform and assist Treasury business and technical teams within BHP Billiton to tackle the scope of the data migration and data conversion challenges in the project. It also ensured a constantly high level of interaction between Data Preparation, Extraction and Validation teams in London and the Data Loading team in Singapore.

Setting up the primary Data Preparation team within Treasury business in London. This afforded Covarius the opportunity to establish and own the data conversion procedures, understand data migration requirements intimately and rapidly respond to data migration challenges. It also afforded Treasury business the opportunity to validate and cleanse legacy transactional and master data with the Covarius data migration team on-site.

Setting up the primary Data Extraction and Validation team within Treasury business in London. By locating technical data extraction conversion within business, BHP Billiton was able to rapidly adjust and validate extraction outcomes instantaneously, thus prevent virtually zero delay in the mock data loading cycles within the testing phases of the 1SAP Treasury project.

Delivery

During the initiation of the data migration portion of the 1SAP Treasury project, it became clear that certain obstacles would need to be overcome to ensure BHP’s objective of automating and solidifying the extraction and validation of data from Quantum into SAP formats. The first of these obstacles including establishing an extraction and transformation layer (ETL) and a staging database for staging this data. The staging database relational table structure, lookup tables and data transformation (DTP) packages were built by the Covarius Quantum lead for BHP Billiton using a SQL Server 2008 database platform.

The second of these obstacles, notably validation of the staged data within the staging database, would require specialized ‘structured queries’ (SQL), stored procedures and programming logic that could be called within SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports, to ensure integrity of data extraction during SAP format export. Each SAP format extraction was accompanied by a validation output log. The Covarius Quantum Lead together with Covarius SAP Treasury data migration lead, jointly worked to construct these queries and crystal reports based on expert knowledge input from the Treasury business.

The development of such logic for BHP Billiton meant that by the time data had been extracted through this process developed by the Data Extraction team in London, very little validation was required to be performed by the Data Loading team in Singapore. The Cransoft warehouse for SAP data extractions, owned by the Data Loading team, was therefore maximally simplified and SAP formats could almost immediately be loaded via LSMW or Business Objects SAP function module call.

The final challenge was to build reconciliation reports to reconcile raw staging database outputs with extracted SAP formats and SAP TRM report post load outputs. This was built using a twenty thousand line VBA model which used various extraction imports to provide a detailed and summary breakdown of line item counts and transactional line to total value reconciliation, for each extraction.

Result

BHP Billiton is a world first for a successful, 71.4% automated Quantum to SAP migration. Covarius, in conjunction with the 1SAP Treasury Data Loading team located in Singapore, delivered a number of world-first extraction mechanisms for automating the extraction, validation and migration of data from SunGard Quantum to SAP TRM using SAP Business Objects.

The result of this successful partnership was a mechanized data migration architecture that resulted in rapid reloading of transactional and master data during mock data conversion cycles and SAP test landscape preparation. This resulted in increased master data integrity, improved transactional data accuracy and faster data loading.

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